Afflicted Aphrodite

I kept seeing her most prized possession sitting in the backseat of the car: her favorite child, my baby brother, Mateo. The nonproblematic child. The healthy child. The eleven-year-old boy who protested against her cruel decision to abandon his gravely ill sister. The child she refused to lose to cancer. March 2012. A single doctor's statement of three words morphs a family's merriment into turmoil and distress. An ordinary teenage girl is forced into a battle against cancer for the second time in her life. But for the first time, she is evasively forced by her mother into fighting the battle alone. Along with the pressures of growing up and trying to be a normal teenage girl, drop-dead-gorgeous Tegan Giovanno determinedly tries to face her life-threatening illness without the aid of her nurturing mother, in the process becoming an ordinary teenager coping with extraordinary things. First-time-published author, fifteen-year-old Norma Molla is a high school student. Having a secret passion for writing, she usually stuck to her comfort zone-writing poetry. In the middle of 2012, she decided to try something new and started focusing on writing her first book, Afflicted Aphrodite.